Tildes Survey #4: What languages can you speak? (Results)
Original post
Submit your response here!
- Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/form/what-languages-can-you-speak-4
- This survey closes on May 17, 2026 at 10:00 UTC
- The results will be published on May 17 shortly after the survey has closed. I'll edit this topic and post a comment about it!
The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:
| Question | Survey opens | Survey closes |
|---|---|---|
| How old are you? | ||
| What country do you live in? | ||
| What country were you born in? | ||
| What languages can you speak? | 2026-05-10 18:00 UTC | 2026-05-17 10:00 UTC |
| Surveys retrospective + Vote for the next 4 surveys | 2026-05-17 18:00 UTC | 2026-05-24 10:00 UTC |
Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.
Thank you all for participating!
The survey has been closed and the results are in!
Thank you to all the 148 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the results! Here's a few quick stats:
- 50 total distinct languages were submitted!
- 30 of which people responded speaking fluently
- 40 of which people responded they are familiar with
- The top 5 languages (combining fluent and familiar):
- English with 146 responses (not a surprise :P)
- French with 54 responses
- Spanish with 50 responses
- German with 39 responses
- Japanese with 25 responses
- And people responded with this many languages (combining fluent and familiar):
- 1 language at 9.5%
- 2 languages at 39.9%
- 3 languages at 22.3%
- 4 languages at 14.9%
- More numbers on the dashboard!
- View the full results dashboard here
- If you have any ideas for visualizations or stats I can add I'd love to hear them!
- ZIP download of the data
Thank you all again for participating!
Also I'm making a change to the schedule! The survey for the coming week will be a simple one: "Pineapple on pizza? Yes or no". I have an idea I'd like to work out to make the surveys more customizable and easier to set up but that will take some time, that's why I'm deciding to have a fun in-between survey and next week we'll have the vote on the next surveys coming up. :)
Erm, just to be clear, my response will be language that I can speak and want to speak. Technically (as a Ukrainian) I can speak russian but I will not.
Can I ask a super broad, related but not at all related question about that?
I dated a Ukrainian 20 or so years ago and her Russian friends would strongarm her (it seemed) into speaking Russian, and very much gloss over the fact that she was from a different country than they were (far away, she was from Lviv). She'd just roll with the arrogance and move on.
Back in the 00s, was there this feeling among Ukrainians living abroad that their culture was in some way dwarfed by Russian culture? Or subservient?
I don't know about your age or experience and whether they differed from this, but I've always been curious about that power dynamic and whether it changed with the revolution in 2014.
Thats a very good, broad and big question.
I'm not a historian or sociologist, so, I can just explain my observations/impressions.
Results of revolution in 2014 imho was mostly political. Idea was to remove russian oriented president from govt. (I remember that Yanukovich election campaign was about Euro-integration, so when he choose russia instead people are of course become quite pissed).
In my opinion practically until the start of the full scale russia invasion russian language was used daily by half (maybe 40%) of the population. Currently I belive it's maybe 5% or smaller.
In 2000s Ukrainian culture is of course influenced by russia. I am from the west of Ukraine so my impression is skewed, but.. most popular book authors are russian, most movies are come from russia, and most abroad art comes translated in (surprise! russian language). It's not like there no good authors or singers or movie directors in Ukraine, it's just russia in broad sense have more money, more people, more broad market for all these things. Also because Ukraine was part of USSR for a long time.
To be honest there was a lot very good unique creators in Ukraine, it's just if you want to have a really broad audience at that time you forced to use russian as language, and forced to use russian market as a mediator.
I've seen that effect several times before - always people who grew up in countries that had been dominated by Russia as part of the USSR and could speak Russian, but refused. Many years ago, when I was just out of college, I'd had a coworker who was Polish and once mentioned that he knew Russian well but would never speak it.
And around 10 years ago, vacationing in the Baltics (lovely countries!) with my spouse who majored in Russian language, it seemed a delicate matter. Making it clear first that we were from the USA (and spoke English as our native language) - before my spouse would offer to switch to Russian if it would be easier - was usually enough to defrost the tension around it.
For what it's worth, the choice of Baltics was a compromise; my spouse really wanted to visit Russia again and show it to me, but refused to do so as long as Putin was in charge. But my spouse had also done a pleasant side trip to Estonia while an exchange student, so I suggested that. I'd definitely vacation there again!
So, sort of like the American relationship with Canada I'd imagine. Some tensions, but because the cultures are so similar and it was a time of peace, the smaller country just accepted that the larger one with more resources would set the agenda for the common culture.
If you zoom way, way out maybe, but Russia's relationship with other former Soviet countries was, even then (it's worse now), way more fraught than the US's relationship with Canada. The US never ruled Canada. Most Americans don't believe themselves to be culturally superior to Canadians. The US never intentionally starved millions of Canadians to death.[1]
It's really difficult to put into words, but there's a sense of really heavy baggage between former Soviet countries that doesn't really exist between America and the rest of the anglosphere.
[1] whether the holodomor was intentional is still a disputed question, but the point here is that the ukrainians almost universally believe that it was.
Great take, thanks!
I'm not well-versed on Soviet history, but is it fair to equate the USSR directly with Russia, given that its longest serving and most brutal leader, Stalin, was Georgian and that Trotsky and Brezhnev were born in what is now Ukraine?
I believe it is, though I appreciate the nuance in your comment. Moscow was the Soviet Union, in much the same way that Paris is France or London is England. That's not true in a literal sense, obviously, but it is true in terms of the cultural/political center of gravity. (The USSR was spawned from the ashes of the Russian Empire). For that reason the other Soviet socialist republics just didn't hold a candle to Russia (Moscow) in terms of importance or influence, and that's reflected today in the fact that Russia is the primary inheritor of the USSR's legacy. Russia still dominates the CIS (the successor organization) and still treats the other members like vassals, not equals. Russians are much more likely to bemoan the collapse of the Soviet Union than other former Soviet peoples.
To that point, Stalin, Trotsky, and Brezhnev were all born to the Russian Empire. They identified as Russians (though Stalin was ethnically Georgian, yes), not independent peoples. I think that underscores the point more than undermining it.
In my view, I would say Russia is the single largest inheritor of the USSR's legacy, but other components of the ex-Soviet Union are also inheritors of that legacy to a lesser extent. Especially with Stalin specifically, it's hard to pin his actions on some fundamental feature of Russian culture or society, given the divergence of his approach to Ukrainian famine compared to the man who was originally responsible for mobilizing Russian society en masse, Lenin. Russians could be faulted for failing to intervene against a brutal strongman, but they definitely wouldn't be alone in facing that criticism.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Would you mind expanding?
A society can be faulted for the actions of its leaders to the extent that it was responsible for putting them and keeping them in power. Lenin led the Bolshevik revolution, while Stalin inherited and co-opted its structures, making Russian society only responsible for the "keeping Stalin in power" bit, and only to the extent they collectively held the largest share of power. Lenin, in contrast to Stalin, was eventually willing to accept humanitarian aid for Ukraine and allow limited free enterprise. Lenin's greatest sin was biblical hubris to a scale never before seen in history, while Stalin's was blatant vindictiveness and cruelty. Russians wouldn't be alone in facing criticism in that the desire for a strongman exists in a variety of cultures, especially in Eastern Europe/Central Asia/the Caucuses.
Ah, okay. Yes, I agree in principle. I was a bit thrown off at first because I hadn't blamed the Russian people for the existence of Stalin, but I get that you're commenting on general views and maybe not necessarily what I said.
The survey has been closed and the results are in!
Thank you to all the 148 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the results! Here's a few quick stats:
Thank you all again for participating!
Also I'm making a change to the schedule! The survey for the coming week will be a simple one: "Pineapple on pizza? Yes or no". I have an idea I'd like to work out to make the surveys more customizable and easier to set up but that will take some time, that's why I'm deciding to have a fun in-between survey and next week we'll have the vote on the next surveys coming up. :)
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Okay own up, who’s fluent in “sarcasm”.
Say ellway, howay utpay igpay atinlay?
That's me, guilty of tainting the data with sarcasm ✋
To be fair, though, it's a language I use daily, multiple times per day. Especially when talking with my dad, who taught it to me.
Oh bother I forgot to reply. Native English, fluent Klingon, tourist French.
I find it interesting that one person said they weren't fluent in anything. Is there a way to check that it wasn't just a blank entry entirely?
Yes that would be this response, for fluent language they put:
And familiar language:
Which I guess I could have put English for both... But I don't mean to assume. ;D
Notification list
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For those of you paying attention to the schedule, next week's "Vote for the next 4 surveys" survey will use the questions you Tildenizens submitted here. So if you haven't yet submitted any questions and you want to leave your mark, make sure to do so before next Sunday. ;)
Why not do the vote for the next 4 surveys in parallel with this one?
I haven't figured out how I want to do it yet and this week was busier than usual for me. :P
Sigh. Classic USA answer incoming: I speak English.
Although I am conversational in French!
But which version of French? My (native French) father describes Canadian French as "the weirdest use of the French language [he has] ever heard in [his] life".
I took 12 years in school in the US. So I learned “high French” as I like to call it. I speak so flowery that even parisians get confused: “ou se trouve les toilettes?”
But if you’re asking accent, I have a thick French accent. Like someone trying to speak English with a British accent 🫠
Oh, we've had this conversation before. I just didn't recognize your username posting from mobile (I've got you taged "French Friend" in Tildes ReExtended).
My dad describes French Canadians as "Lovely people, but they say the weirdest literal English translations. If you say 'Merci', instead of 'De rien' they will reply 'Bienvenue!' "
Whoa! That’s a huge trip! I don’t think I’d get that at all if I heard it. Haha
I would say ou se trouve les toilettes and I learned my French in high school in the UK in the 1980s, haha. I might prefix that with "excuse moi, pouvez vous me dir"
Chalice, il neige en tabarnak!
Quebecois French sounds cool to me.
I am less than conversational in French but can muddle my way through reading or listening better than speaking
I can start a conversation after careful planning and rehearsing. Then I forget the vocab or a gender, get flustered, power through, and stop listening when the other speaker responds. ;-;
But I was able to make it through two weeks in Belgium and France so I got something right?
Much better than me, I'm too shy to even try
I was shy my first trip to France. But this trip, my partner took us to a grocery store in the country side and said “we need meat, cheese, and bread. Go order some at the counter.” And unfortunately when I said “Pardon ma francaise je sais seulement un petit peu. Parlez vous englaise peut-etre?” They said “non” with a smile and it was all downhill (from an embarrassment standpoint) from there.
What did help actually was staying in a dairy farm outside Brussels: the farmer spoke English, Flemish, and French. They were much more forgiving of my lack of vocab and even complimented me. Did wonders for my confidence.
I have not been able to travel to Europe since I was in college and never got to go to France or any francophone country and, yeah. Most of what I overhear is Carribbean French of some sort or another so I only catch bits and pieces.
Unfortunately I'm probably never getting fluent
I am fluent in English, but I can also speak Mandarin and Japanese. I'm not fluent in either, but I can hold a basic conversation that's not just "Hello, what's your name?".
I know it's not part of the questions but I did give learning Korean a go (self-taught mind you) a few months ago, and have gotten to the point where I can read slowly. Maybe that's something that could also be asked; what language do you want to learn/have you attempted to learn?
Romanian as my native language, and very fluent in English.
I do know bits and bobs of French and Italian, and because of that I can generally stumble my way through any Romance language, but I would not consider myself conversationalist in either of them.
English Muthafucka
Between you and Hegseth, that's twice this year I've seen a Pulp Fiction reference!
No I was quoting the bible
My favorite "bible" verse:
“The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil man. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen."
Amen.
Fluent in Dutch, English, and German. I can speak and understand French and Spanish enough to order food and drinks.